Jacob Jones provides some challenging puzzles, great visuals and sound and by the end of the episode you'll be hooked along for the ride and hoping episode 2 is not too far away.

Jacob Jones is a puzzle-based game similar to the Professor Layton and Puzzle Agent series. You control Jacob as he is dropped off by his biologist parents to a summer camp where Jacob meets new people and one large bigfoot, and helps almost everyone out by solving puzzles for them. This is only episode one of five and seems to be setting up the overarching story of helping out Biggie the Bigfoot and Jacob coming out of his shell and getting to know new kids after spending so long solving puzzles and travelling with his parents.

The puzzles can go from easy to really tough depending on how good you are at puzzle solving. You're likely to spend a few hours exploring the camp, talking to people and solving puzzles. The game is pretty linear but each area is filled with cans hidden in the environment for you to try and seek out as they can help you pay for hints for when a puzzle gets too tough. Can hunting can fill out the time depending how much you want to collect everything the game has to offer.

Visuals

Jacob Jones looks amazing for an iPhone game. This could be because it was also released for the PS Vita. The visual style has the world looking like a cartoony pop-up book with any 3D objects, including the people, looking like they were made out of papercraft. The world they have created for these summer campers is charming and cute and makes me look forward to more episodes.

Sound

The thing that immediately stood out is that every character is fully voice-acted, and it sounds like they paid the cash to bring in some good actors. None of the characters feel like they're voiced badly, and it really helps build the personalities you get to know over the course of the episodes. The music also sounds great and adds to the cute cartoony atmosphere.

Are there any in-app purchases?

There are no extra purchases at this time. The title screen shows the other episodes are coming soon and it is currently unclear if you will have to purchase the remaining episodes through the same app, or if there will be separate apps for each game.

Control

Movement is largely controlled by swiping the screen to change the view and tapping to go to new areas. You can also tilt the screen to look around some objects in the world to help find the small cans hidden around the world. With the iPhone it was at times a bit hard to find some cans because the game doesn't tell you about the tilting to get a better view until you're further in the game, but it's never a real issue.